Post by Dracula on Dec 26, 2022 21:59:02 GMT -5
Empire of Light(12/8/2022)
I will say, I went into Empire of Light not expecting much. The phrase “Oscar bait” gets overused a lot but this certainly seemed to fit the bill and it’s been damned with faint praise by pretty much anyone who’s seen it since it debuted at Telluride. The film is about the goings on at a beautiful old movie theater in coastal England during the early 1980s. At its best that could give us a sort of British Cinema Paradiso and at worst it could lead to an overwrought rhapsody for “the magic of the cinema” that basically plays like a feature length version of Nicole Kidman’s “We Make Movies Better” AMC ad. The actual movie lies somewhere between those two things. Director Sam Mendes has a palpable nostalgia for this era which can be contagious and intoxicating but he also feels compelled to acknowledge that this was in fact a very bad era for people who weren’t white men, which isn’t an inherently bad instinct but it means the movie tries to take on themes of racism, sexual harassment, and mental health that it really cannot sustain and sort of feels like a social realist square peg trying to be inserted into a gooey nostalgic round hole.
At the film’s center is a middle aged theater manager played by Olivia Colman who suffers form mental illness and is also having a not very consensual affair with the theater’s owner, played by Colin Firth, and finds solace in another theater employee in his early twenties played by Michael Ward. The film frankly doesn’t sell this relationship very well. The fact that she is in just as much of a power imbalance with him as she is with her boss is an irony that’s not very well explored and even without that issue the movie just does not really make it terribly clear what he sees in this older and seemingly not very well adjusted woman. Frankly, if the genders were reversed this would feel like somewhat creepy wish fulfilment for some old sad sack writer. It also doesn’t help that Sam Mendes does not seem to have the slightest clue how to write this black character and makes him into a rather awkward “model minority” rather than a three dimensional character and its interest in exploring the racism of the Thatcher era feels slight compared to something like “Small Axe” or even Blinded by the Light. Having said all that, the film is not without its charms. The film also has some really slick cinematography by Roger Deakins, a good score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and it’s generally pretty well acted by its cast as well and all of this generally makes the film a perfectly watchable experience but there isn’t really a lot of substance beneath the surface despite pretentions of import.
**1/2 out of Five
I will say, I went into Empire of Light not expecting much. The phrase “Oscar bait” gets overused a lot but this certainly seemed to fit the bill and it’s been damned with faint praise by pretty much anyone who’s seen it since it debuted at Telluride. The film is about the goings on at a beautiful old movie theater in coastal England during the early 1980s. At its best that could give us a sort of British Cinema Paradiso and at worst it could lead to an overwrought rhapsody for “the magic of the cinema” that basically plays like a feature length version of Nicole Kidman’s “We Make Movies Better” AMC ad. The actual movie lies somewhere between those two things. Director Sam Mendes has a palpable nostalgia for this era which can be contagious and intoxicating but he also feels compelled to acknowledge that this was in fact a very bad era for people who weren’t white men, which isn’t an inherently bad instinct but it means the movie tries to take on themes of racism, sexual harassment, and mental health that it really cannot sustain and sort of feels like a social realist square peg trying to be inserted into a gooey nostalgic round hole.
At the film’s center is a middle aged theater manager played by Olivia Colman who suffers form mental illness and is also having a not very consensual affair with the theater’s owner, played by Colin Firth, and finds solace in another theater employee in his early twenties played by Michael Ward. The film frankly doesn’t sell this relationship very well. The fact that she is in just as much of a power imbalance with him as she is with her boss is an irony that’s not very well explored and even without that issue the movie just does not really make it terribly clear what he sees in this older and seemingly not very well adjusted woman. Frankly, if the genders were reversed this would feel like somewhat creepy wish fulfilment for some old sad sack writer. It also doesn’t help that Sam Mendes does not seem to have the slightest clue how to write this black character and makes him into a rather awkward “model minority” rather than a three dimensional character and its interest in exploring the racism of the Thatcher era feels slight compared to something like “Small Axe” or even Blinded by the Light. Having said all that, the film is not without its charms. The film also has some really slick cinematography by Roger Deakins, a good score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and it’s generally pretty well acted by its cast as well and all of this generally makes the film a perfectly watchable experience but there isn’t really a lot of substance beneath the surface despite pretentions of import.
**1/2 out of Five
